that life that is slowly waking

"In the depths on your green eyes, you loafer, I can clearly see the land of laziness. I can see golden hills where you will bask. I can see the sofas of your many-houred snoozes. I can see heaps of notebooks you will never cover with writing. I can see the thousand peaceful cities where you will live from day to day, a thousand peaceful white cities of phlegmatic architecture and friendly climate. Torrid heat reigns from early morning. A streetcar, open on both sides, is making its way through green pastures. Oh, how sweet it will be, to live in the heart of that life that is slowly waking but always nodding off again before final awakening. Open windows, dark apartments, the somnolent dramas of the residents, an oval table covered with a cloth, the remains of banquets that never end, hammocks, easy chairs, old architecture, a thousand gentle rivers under a thousand old bridges, lazy girls going for walks along grassy shores...I'm afraid it's already too late. If you have the misfortune to chance upon a lazy body at the very beginning of your youth, you'll be lost for life. Your innate tendency toward laziness will be awakened and set for all time, and you'll spend your entire life searching for the promised land of laziness. You'll pass through a thousand peaceful cities. All your life you'll hunger for lazy arms. You won't live, you'll sleep instead."*

Be patient with me. Nothing I'd ever say out loud, in the real world. In the real world I'm always tapping my fingers, ready to move on, always rushing around. Inside though, alone in my room, I beg the world for patience. I have to have the exact right amount of time to write. The exact right amount of uneasiness and unhappiness, but not too much, because then I'll be busy taking care of it. There's always something to take care of, but it's hard taking care of ones own self.

I thought that lately I'd been happy. I was wrong. I'm not even sure I deserve to be happy, but really I think I was just being lazy. When it's easy to sleep past noon and stay up with someone, one on one, why wouldn't you? I realized that I need a break from being self-indulgent. This weekend I drank a lot, ran around with old friends and caused some trouble. It was fun, but I got sick and had to lay in bed for the past three days thinking. I mean really Thinking. Maybe that made me even more sick. I realized I still have a lot of work to do before I can be really happy, and that does seem like the point, to me anyway, just to be happy in the end. I saw my friend Charlie this weekend and he said he missed reading my blog, he asked why I'd been so busy, why I haven't been writing, and over beers I realized I didn't have a good excuse. So here you go Charlie, this ones for you.

Rose Cross has one song about partying. The gist is "turn off my brain" and I hop up and down and pogo and it sounds happy but it isn't. I spend a lot of time wondering why I have to be the one to think so goddamn hard. Everyone else seems ok most of the time, like nine out of ten people can walk into a messy room and feel fine and I'm the tenth person that walks in and completely looses it. Going into work and fixing other peoples mistakes, cleaning up after people, putting things back in their place...where does that bone in my body come from? Why can't I coast along, doing the bare minimum, smiling dumbly and dutifully? I get frustrated at everyone's lack of interest with the problems around them, and am worn out always trying to fix them. I often feel like I don't have much to show for it either. Sure, I work a lot, but I'd have rather been at that Halloween party than standing behind the bar for eight hours. I had a really amazing boyfriend for about five months but then I freaked out, thought I was doing everything wrong, felt depressed and ended it (that is the very, very short version of the story). If I could let things go...wouldn't I be happier?

Well fuck that. I'm not going to let New Years sneak up on me. I'm making my resolution now. No more sleeping in, no more comfort, no more easy living. I'm going to be writing more, updating this more, and trying to fix all the goddamn problems, and I don't care how unhappy it makes me. In the end it'll probably be worth it. Probably.

*Jerzy Pilch, A Thousand Peaceful Cities

dolce vita

"All those gentleman and ladies and boys and girls sitting at tables in that cafe- they were right, unquestionably right. As they talked, they become more and more certain of how right they were. And their certainty about being right was built on ridicule, devastation, and scorn for other people. they more they talked, the more they were right, the more their rightness demanded its tribute of words, threats, and gestures. As that tribute piled up, all the others,those who were in the wrong, became increasingly alone and unhappy. I looked out the window, across the street, and I saw other people sitting in other cafes: they were right too. This immense, single-minded rightness had split the world into two camps: those who has right on their sides (which is to say, everyone), and the others (which is to say, again, everyone)."*

I got into an argument with Daniel about literature, or rather an argument about Truth, since he reads mostly nonfiction, and mostly philosophy, which he thinks is a part of the Quest, and I think literature, specifically fiction and also poetry, makes for the surer road. He threw a biblical reference to me, about Babylon, and all the poor fuckers scratching in the dark, and I got wildly upset at the idea of all of this being some sort of misadventure, even though most of the time I'm convinced it is. Most books make our problems greater, but there has to be some truth in that. He meant, I think, that most people who write just don't have their hearts in the right place, which maybe makes "accredited theories" a better shot at figuring out the ways of the world and ourselves, but I think the same can be said for everyone. A lot of people don't have their hearts in the right place, they're on some other road entirely.

I think some reading ends up being in the "entertainment" category for me. A lot of the comics I read aren't going to teach me anything new about the world, but then again, X Men has a very special place in my socio-political arguments. Bolano is good, Marquez is also good (even though I know he would had to think so, Bolano had a hefty distaste for Marquez but as I explained to a friend the other day, it's like listening to both Morrissey AND Discharge), Mark Twain and Melville are good, Borges is good, and we all know there's mountains and mountains of trash in the literary world. Doesn't mean I'm going to give up reading. Anyway it seems like that's what most writers spend time thinking about anyway, in any interview you've got at least a few pages of the author talking about which writers he or she admires, and which books still matter, and that's all critics are trying to figure out anyway besides. I don't want to take sides in the fiction vs. nonfiction debate, despite the fact that I've been quietly thinking about it ever since the other morning over breakfast, which I was drinking my coffee reading a fantasy novel and Daniel was reading Gurdjieff.

*Stefano Benni, Margherita Dolce Vita

the siren call of the question mark

"Just as the shape of natural objects like rainbows, snowflakes, crystals and blossoming flowers derives from the symmetrical way that quarks arrange themselves in the atom- a remnant of the universe's lost state of perfect symmetry- so he is convinced that the unhappy state of affairs regarding love can be traces right back to the subatomic. If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime's demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality's building blocks, its particles, its exchanges of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents."*

I think I owe the Internet an explanation about my absence, but it would be so trite I don't think I could actually bring myself to write it out. I did go to Texas, I am in Europe now, and I guess I could talk about the late nights at work couldn't I? What's the point. Spring stretched out for me like a neglected lawn, punctuated only by reading some fantasy books, which I won't get into here but I think it had the effect of a big pile of sand for my head (i.e. I'm the proverbial ostrich). I think I had sort of given up, accepted the loneliness but also the fact that I couldn't be of any use helping anyone else with their hurts and wants. Although, on a night recently I helped Adrien clean the blood off his hands and face, sat him down with a fizzy water and told him to tell me all about it. So cuts and scraps I can handle, but the big existential problems I'd put on the back burner, at least until after my Great Rambling Adventure in Europe.

"Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over again I made the same mistake, hurt other people and hurt myself into the bargain. Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed- maybe they were part of my very make-up, an inescapable part of my being."**

I read that on the train from Berlin to Prague and it articulated exactly how I felt around the end of May. I felt happy to see my friends, happy to jump into the springs, even happy to wake up with a hangover. Yet I felt like I'd given up on trying to actually be happy. I thought if I just kept my head up, tried not to get involved with anyone, and worked hard, that I'd end up on the other side of my self-loathing.

Of course, thankfully, the world isn't that simple. I ended up kissing someone I've wanted to kiss for a long time, and the rug not only got pulled out from under my feet but suddenly pop songs on the radio started making sense too. I've never felt so utterly insane for someone. But, this isn't a blog about happiness, or musings on romance, so suffice to say that while something rather fundamental in my life up to this point has changed, the big questions remain.

I've spent my time here walking around, endlessly, climbing everything I see, and drinking an incredible amount of coffee. People keep asking me what I'm up to, why I'm here, alone, etc. I feel somewhat sheepish answering, "oh you know, just looking around." I did read One Hundred Years of Solitude again, which still makes me cry, and am rounding book 5 now that I've reached Budapest (I've picked up whatever I could get my hands on at used book stores, which has been surprisingly fruitful). In Vitezslav Nezval's book Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, which I read in Prague, he dedicated the book to, "those who, like myself, gladly pause at times over the secrets of certain old courtyards, vaults, summer houses and those mental loops which gyrate around the mysterious." So I walk a few kilometers (cultural note!) and then stop to stare at the view or a statue or just to smoke a cigarette in silence. I wrote Ryan and told him how I felt like a big key was in my head winding everything up the right way, like all the little gears are tuned correctly now, and when I come home I'll be lighter, clearer, dare I say it, happier. Maybe it's enough just to have my eyes open, and to have some time to think.

There's a true feedback story about exactly everything I've just written called don't give up on nihilism, and goddamn, I can't wait to get home to Gainesville to listen to it.

*Paul Murray, Skippy Dies, pg. 300
**Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, pg. 42

Unknown Pleasures

"Memory is not what the heart desires."*

I drove into Melbourne going South on A1A, listening to Joy Division on accident. I wanted to play the Mind Spiders record but it was somewhere behind my seat, just out of reach, and I was too stubborn to pull over on the way down from Gainesville. Just needed to finish this one last thing, I kept telling myself, and then it's all over. I'll probably never come back here again. Suddenly the song seemed just right.

I lived in Melbourne for four years with my mom after we moved down from St. Augustine. I'm still friends with my three best friends from high school, but I don't come into town if I don't have to. I had to come down to help my mom pack up the house, which she sold last week, and now she's moving to Asheville. Lucky her. Last night I packed up my room. I threw out everything I could. Boxes and boxes of pictures of people I don't know anymore. Fliers for shows I barely remember. Notes from girls in high school, and notes from boys I wanted to kiss. The term overwhelmingly depressing doesn't begin to scratch the surface. The most unsettling things uncovered though were my own writings, which for some reason my mom kept. Folders and folders of short stories, poems, essays, and then the journals, at least a dozen of them. All so totally pathetic and foolish. I thought I understood solitude and depression at seventeen, what a joke. I should have been out on the beach kissing boys and hanging out, I should have been huffing glue and fucking up way more than I did. Didn't I know what was in store for me? Once all the promise ran out? DIDN'T I? All the stories are sort of banal and all the private thoughts from the journals are so pathetic, and I felt a shudder of foreshadowing as I read through them; will these thoughts I'm writing now look the same in twenty years? I'll admit to being hopelessly self-centered and a little too romantic at times, but I'd like to think I've gotten wildly smarter in the past seven years (seven years since high school, holy shit it burns) but I began to feel vibrations of doubt...do I remain the foolish kid I know I was? Terrifying. I won't think about it anymore this morning.

So now my mom has me packing up her books. Boxes and boxes of books. It's going to take me all 24 hours of today, since every few books I stop and start reading. I can't pick up the Mark Twain, Melville, Marquez, Salinger, Zadie Smith books without sneaking in a few pages. Every book marks a memory just like the pictures I threw out upstairs. Every chapter a chapter, if it's not too easy a metaphor. I told my mom over coffee this morning, "friends and punk shows make up half of my best memories, but these books make up the other half." So my mom may be moving out of this place that's suppose to be my hometown, but I know where to visit ghosts if I need to.

*Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring

Know When to Hold Em

"A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. But that's not true: there are obviously limits to what a human being can endure. Really endure. A poet, on the other hand, can endure anything. We grew up with this conviction. The opening assertion is true, but that way lie ruin, madness, and death."*

I. The last time I thought about this quote was over a month ago, I was driving home from Orlando by myself. I'd pretty much do anything to avoid driving by myself, because that's when everything comes bubbling up. I can create distractions for a little while- Lord of the Rings on tape, K Country on the radio, NPR, phone calls, but in the end somehow I always find myself alone, driving in silence. It's all I can handle, and at the same time it's all I can handle. I think about friends I've abused, relationships I've trashed, jobs I've fucked up, places I've abandoned. It seems like hell, but the thing that pains me most is the thought that it isn't enough, because I know at the end of the day it isn't enough just to think about the small crimes we've committed. I know somehow it isn't enough just to think hard on anything, the real pain isn't there, the real fucked up parts aren't committed solely to my head, they belong to other people now, and other places.

III. A woman was found in her apartment surrounded by fan mail. She had been dead for over a year and no one noticed. There's something enticingly fucked up about someone dying among boxes of people saying they loved her. Such an obvious metaphor. It freaks me out for other reasons. I'm upset that someone can be loved and still die alone in their apartment. It hurts somewhere in the soft part of my brain to know that you can achieve some sort of happy status and still wind up alone, and I don't mean solitude which is invasive but I mean alone which is tangible.

IV. So what's the point of trying at all? I mean trying like, doing something important, or doing something good, whatever that means to you. I've been having a lot of conversations. I've been reading a lot of books. I haven't figured it out, only gone to sleep more and more nervous. The original Bolaño quote is about what we can take, as in what we think we can take (or maybe what we think we're missing) and it comes back to the reason why anyone gets out of bed in the morning. So I think after a couple weeks of sitting on this the only thing I've come up with is having sincere relationships with people. I don't necessarily mean romantic relationships, although sometimes I think they manage to be the best kind. I only mean that as I've gotten older, i.e. thought more about the things I'm doing, better relationships have had more meaning to me. The only things I can consider important in the past few months are the relationships I've cultivated- and also the fact that I've earned them. It feels good to be able to call a friend for coffee in the morning. Period. It doesn't matter what the underlying context for your friendships is (right?). I remind myself that I am one of the lucky few that can meet up with someone when I need to. I guess that's what keeps me going most of the time.

V. Here's the link to the article. http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/03/rip-yvette-vickers-c.html

VI. I promise the next blog post will be about Kenny Rogers. Just wait.

*Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Martîn. From Last Evenings on Earth

Secret Story

"So now you're wondering what I mean by the secret story? asked my friend. Well the secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie."*

I. Your hands shake when you hold the microphone. You don't trust your voice. You know all your friends are watching, but you can't help the shaky attempt at harmony that follows. Karaoke terrifies you. The words go across the screen, but they're hard to read, uncertain like everything else. You've been told you can do this. You try one more time. You don't recognize your voice when it comes out of the speakers, singing a song you didn't write.

II. I work for ten hours and cut a few corners to get out early. I have to get to the show before the second bands starts. I show up and nothing's started. No one's even talking. I go across the street and have a few beers with the people I rushed over with. One does karaoke and the other buys beers. I wish I had the nerve to sing a song but I can't stand the anticipation of waiting to hear my name called. The song ends. We finish the beers. Across the street the show starts without anyone noticing, but we're there just in time to stand around.

III. You figure out how to play guitar, you think, this is easier than singing. There is a comfort in the rhythm, not like the awkward cadence and meter of your voice. You practice to Ramone's songs in your room. There will be late nights, but there will be some progress. You "figure it out." There will be pedals, cords, and equipment. Your friends like it.

IV. The band at the show makes me want to go home and work on things I started months ago. I have to finish this or that project, I have to do something after watching them. The two people playing sounded great together. Proof that something can be done. I know I nodded my head, moved my feet around, but the whole time I was thinking "I have to get home, I can finish that sentence now." I get a record, I literally ask for the one "with the weird slow songs on it" and I balance it across my handle bars. I begin a story in my head while I bike home, "your hands shake when you hold the microphone..."

V. You make it to the show in a town you've only read about. Your friends aren't there. You are singing in a band for the first time and your hands still shake when you hold the microphone. You hold the guitar close like you could be dancing. Everyone stands in a weak half moon in front of you, but they tap their black shoes when your voice comes out awkward, then clear. You have no idea if anyone really liked it, but you get a few smiles, and someone buys a record. You see them biking off alone one by one and you go back to your van. You sit in the dark and tell yourself you're not alone.

*Roberto Bolaño, Dentist

Greener Pastures of Our Hearts

"Many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. They try their skill at enjoyment and 'indulging in experiences.' But this is illusory. It requires a rare vocation to be a sensualist. The life of a man is fulfilled without the aid of his mind, with its backward and forward movements, at one and the same time its solitude and its presences. To see these men of Belcourt working, protecting their wives and children, and often without a reproach, I think one can feel a secret shame. To be sure, I have no illusions about it. There is not much love in the lives I am speaking of. I ought to say that not much remains. But at least they have evaded nothing. There are words I have never really understood, such as 'sin.' Yet I believe these men have never sinned against life. For if there is a sin against life, it consist perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. These men have not cheated. Gods of summer they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life and they still are, deprived of all hope. From Pandora's box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all."*

Ah, spring time in Gainesville. Flowers are blooming on every corner, showing their faces like freed criminals and making my eyes water constantly despite all the Benadryl I've been eating. Through the haze of allergy medicine I stop to take note of the amazing greenness that's going on around town, everything all at once coming back to life with a sort of fascist vengeance. So too are the dormant pastures in our hearts turning green again, growing wild with the season.

I wake up every morning to a bracelet of hives (there is literally pollen covering every single fucking thing that I touch) and either an email, text message, or missed phone call from someone I haven't spoken to in enough time for it to seem disconcerting. My favorite this week was a message from an old friend that just said, "sorry for when we were young." I knew just what he meant, but I couldn't possibly explain it here, to the dark abyss of the internet. Suffice to say that there's something about the weather changing that makes people get teary eyed (for me it's half allergies and half nostalgia). We see the greener fields not just on the other side of the road (metaphorically and literally, work with me here) but also behind us. I want to wake up in the middle of the night and call Joe and talk to him about Mexico. Remember that time when...? Spring is the best time to send text messages that break the ice of winter or several years. There's something about the first warm days of shorts and afternoon bike rides that make everyone a little more prone to forgive and forget, or at least that's how it feels to me lately. I feel so high on all the drugs I'm eating and all the mended relationships that I find myself wanting more. This is good weather for "what might have been" and "what could be." I know for 24 hours this week if the right person would have asked I'd have moved out of Gainesville to live in their little room in a heartbeat (you know who you are, maybe). With the weather changing and after five months of being so completely alone next to my tiny little space heater the thought of going swimming with one person all summer and maybe even drinking frozen drinks with paper umbrellas in them sounds great, it sounds perfect, it sounds...possible?

What the fuck am I saying? Does this sound like me? Read my last few posts and you'll be asking yourself, "who the fuck is this happy stranger? I mean I know she has a 'posi' tattoo but this is getting really pathetic!" I know. It's not me though, I swear, it's spring. Everyone has seen Bambi and if you say you haven't you're lying, but everyone might not remember the scene where the little rabbit (Thumper) explains to Bambi why all the animals are acting bonkers. It's because they're twitterpated. I'm guessing on the spelling of that, but it sounds right. I think it was the Disney way of saying "horny" but I think they touched on something else. There is a certain kind of spring horniess that makes everyone go crazy. Maybe it's the shedding of clothes after winter, maybe it's the animal instinct taking over after hibernation, but either way it makes me feel overwhelmed by all the possibilities. The possibilities of what? I don't know, happiness maybe? I talked late into the night with a trusted friend about relationships, and the conclusions were all doom and gloom. I think my brain is fucked up beyond repair, and not from things I've done to it lately. I don't know if a few weeks of good weather can fix it.

There's either a Cometbus zine (80% sure it was him) that talks about the weather being great all of a sudden and walking around kind of smug like knowing if you asked someone to marry you they'd say yes, and that's sort of what it seems like lately, not just because of the weather but because of this terrible, awful winter ending and it just seems right to start completely over. But, I think I ought to know better. These feelings won't last, and as soon as weekly trips to the springs start and it's warm enough to go swimming when I get off work, I won't be thinking of what's on the other side of the fence. We'll all be focused on what's right in front of our faces, which may not be pretty but at least it'll be honest. The phone will stop ringing. The messages will stop coming. I know enough to know we'll all still forget about each other again.

*Albert Camus, Summer in Algiers

Litany Against Fear

"Without change something inside us sleeps."*

He asks on the phone, "how are you doing?" which makes me pause, because unlike with my mom or most of my friends, I actually want to tell the truth. Sandy's more to me than an old boss, he's really the dad I always wanted. Am I ok? Are we ok? He understands the daily cups of coffee, the afternoons on the porch, the quiet unchanging moments of the day to day which make things seem alright. He also understands the restlessness, the need to be looking over the edge at something, the days spent traveling alone, waiting in train stations where we recognize none of the signs and none of the people. We both love books, but there aren't books for this sort of disconnect. Books that explain the highs and lows - the weekend punk rock shows and the tuesday morning trips to the post office, so that they become one narrative, one feeling? I tell him I'm enjoying myself, but am basically really, really lonely. He tells me the same thing. We talk about long distant romances and our fears of slowly becoming too solitary for redemption. It's as if we've backed ourselves into a corner, and it'd be nice of someone lured us out, but until then we're content to sit and face the wall.

Punks don't like change in general. All in all, an entirely reactionary group of people. How many of us are conservative in our routines and interests? I get cranky in the morning when there's a boy in my bed and I can't drink my iced coffee immediately, what would being in an actual relationship be like? I still wake up hungry for experiences though, and it's depressing to see the young adults who've apparently had their fill. New bands and people become threats if you let them. Sometimes the change gets too much, you turn your back on the world for a little bit but since it keeps going on without you, when you look again everything's different and you're even more alone and stubborn as before. There's opposite problems too, people so hungry for something new they aren't discerning and their tastes aren't their tastes at all, just another passing fad. The way you experience something ought to count for something too. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration, but what about stagnation?

I spent all day doing exactly what I wanted. Watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, reading comic books, drinking two iced coffees at the two coffee shops I go to, eating when I wanted and what I wanted (jackfruit sandwich, yucca fries, goat cheese) and then sitting on the sofa for two hours thinking about Dune, change, and routines. No one stopped me. No one challenged me. I didn't even have to share my personal space with anyone. This can't be healthy. There's nothing new coming in, just a steady consuming. That's when it's time to leave the house. Pick out a book from the different part of the library (mystery?). Meet someone somewhere new, or even try to meet someone new. I know I can't live in a little bubble that I control all the time, I have to let something in, even if it's just a little new idea, or a new band. If you wake up and everything goes your way and everything's the same you didn't wake up at all. I told Mike on the phone today that the weather was so perfect I thought maybe I was dead, and he said, "well maybe you're in purgatory," and it hit a little too close to home. The sleeper must awaken.

*Dune

The Possibility that Love is Not Enough

"For me, boredom is not the opposite of amusement; I might even go so far as to say that in certain aspects it actually resembles amusement inasmuch as it gives rise to distraction and forgetfulness, even if of a very special type. Boredom to me consists in a kind of insufficiency, or inadequacy, or lack or reality. Reality, when I am bored, has always had the same disconcerting effect upon me as a too-short blanket has open a sleeping man on a winter night: he pulls it down over his feet and his chest gets cold, then he pulls it up on to his chest and his feet get cold, and so he never succeeds in falling properly asleep. [...] The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence."*

I. We're sitting at the bar, made of antique dark wood and accented with brass and a doting bartender in white. I probably don't belong here. I'm not sure where I belong exactly, but even dressed up with leather boots and lace, still probably not here. Kaysie and I came to Marks to eat steak, or Kaysie came to watch me eat steak. We sip dirty martinis in chilled glasses, we make plans for the night that will go mostly unfulfilled. I order the filet kabobs because it's happy hour and they're only five dollars (just trying to point out that I'm not a complete asshole, not yet) and Kaysie makes some sort of noise that implies excitement or approval or amusement. I haven't eaten meat in ten years, and then I woke up and called my very best meat eating friend and said, "today."

On my second martini the little meat pieces come out and I pull them off the wood skewers with the silver fork. I can't think of any reason not to indulge myself in this. I eat thoughtfully. The last time I ate meat was with my dad. The taste brings back the smell of restaurants a decade ago, of meals and afternoons happily spent. Salty and good, but not quite enough. Like kissing someone you've had a crush on forever only to discover he's terribly clumsy and awkward. We put our glasses down and shrug our shoulders, tip twenty percent and go to the party. There's always something else to do, even if we have to create it for ourselves.

II. I'm at the bar cleaning up. It's two in the morning and everyone's gone except other people who work there. I have a lot to do, and I won't get home until three, and by then no one will be awake. I'll read one of the books piled up next to my bed. Books about dictators, about falling in love, about wolves, or just poetry. Each one either a familiar comfort or a slap in the face, each one an escape. Sometimes the nights are full of fun and flirting. People in a good mood, actually enjoying each others company or pretending really well. Tonight I had some bad conversations. Like everyone decided to fall apart at the same time. Everyone's unhappy. Like Garland Briggs in Twin Peaks who confesses under oath "the possibility that love is not enough" we've all hit a wall. Sometimes you have those mornings when you wake up and you're convinced all your friends hate you, and the only thing you have in common are the clothes on your back and the records on your shelves. I can hold your hand and say it's not true, pour you a shot and tell you tomorrow's another day, but who will hold my hand when I go home? Who will make me swear an oath to all my great fears?

Ryan walks up and we start talking over beers, just about work while I sweep up cigarettes and straws. Then the conversations breaks, we start talking about lost loves, every cliche in the book, but things that we need to talk about at three in the morning sometimes. A weird feeling sets in and I realize I'm feeling better. Not that anything was wrong, I wasn't exactly sad, but talking with Ryan I feel more like myself. Reassessed and reassured, like organizing the shelves in my brain and putting the best of the clutter in the front. I think I rode my bike home just happy to have a real friend, one that can still make me feel better, that can cut through the veil of loneliness and make me open my eyes a little wider at the world.

III. I've been considering what it means to be friends with someone. I talk to a lot of people, I like a lot of people, at least casually. Still, it's a little shocking to discover I actually like most of the people I'm friends with. It's easy to forget why sometimes. Anyone could be friends with such attractive, charming people. Having common interests pales in comparison to being able to have a good conversation. Being able to be quiet together, also, like how me and Adrien can be together and just stare at a wall. We need others to share the trouble, or even just the boredom with us. I consider the possibility that it is enough for me.

*Boredom, Alberto Moravia

A Little Like Giving Up

"As an ironic spectator of myself, I've never lost interest in seeing what life brings. And since I now know beforehand that every vague hope will end in disillusion, I have the special delight of already enjoying the disillusion with the hope, like the bitter with the sweet that makes the sweet sweeter by contrast. I'm a sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new engagement."*

Drinking leads into itself. Once you drink a beer, at the bar or on a porch, alone or with friends, the next beer waits for you like mail waiting to be delivered. Then, the next thing you do seems so easy. Of course you want to go to the next bar, the other club, just for a dance, just for another drink, just to see who might be there, who or what else might be waiting. A good idea, on a Friday night maybe, when you're with your friends who will follow you anywhere and into anything. Then sometimes you're just left waiting. On the curb, in front of the bar. Sitting on the steps in front of your house, not willing to admit the night has ended, and there's nothing else waiting for you. No more possibilities. Just your empty bed and a cloud hanging around you, filled with what might have been and all the something else's that wait for you on another night.

Sometimes I know better. Sometimes there's something to wake up for in the morning, and going to bed sounds great, like the easiest part of my day. Other times I just know the night's a lost cause. It doesn't matter how many beers I drink, or how many different people I try to find, it's time to go home. I ride through the streets, avoiding distraction, and remind myself that these are the constants- my companions for the past five years- a bicycle and an empty night, weaving toward somewhere I don't even need to be.

*Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The Whole Pathetic Nine Yards

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."*

Today I cried twice like a little baby. Big heavy wet tears, soaked cheeks, the whole pathetic nine yards. The first time I really let loose. A nurse couldn't find a vein in my right arm, so she kept pulling the needle out and sticking it back in, and sort of nosing it around a little, and then when she found it, pulling out my blood (which I need, to survive, apparently) and putting it away in a little vial and sending it off with a bunch of other little vials to determine if I am seriously sick (I'm not). Shit sucked. I don't like needles, I like getting tattooed to an extent, but I've never liked getting injections or getting blood drawn, I immediately start to sweat, I feel sick, light-headed, and all the stuff they asked me if I felt to begin with. So once again, in less than a week, I found myself crying in a hospital. Yeah, it hurt really bad, and the IV felt pretty lousy, and I could feel the fluid (all sorts of fluids!) moving up my arm and into my chest, and I sort of felt like Frodo when he got stabbed on Weathertop, but I also think I cried because I felt a little sorry for myself. Every time I get sick I miss my mom (I'm being serious), I miss having someone there to hold my hand and tell me it's going to be OKAY, I can't help it. Growing up, we find ourselves in these situations where it would be really nice to have someone around (or health insurance for that matter) and it feels harder when you're trying to do it all by yourself. I'm luckier than most people, I had a friend who drove me to the ER and sat there the whole time while I got stuck with needles and acted like a brat, and she didn't ask for anything in return (I took her to lunch anyway). Most people who are sick, or hurt, or really, really fucking sad have to be alone, they don't have anyone to turn to. I should be grateful, but sitting there feeling like I was going to puke on the nurse, I couldn't help it, I had to embrace the suckiness of the situation and let it in. Not my proudest moment. I probably won't go back to the hospital anytime soon, but I have lots of friends who have had to go over and over again without health insurance, and I can just imagine they cry like big babies too when they open their hospital bills. Really, you can't imagine opening a bill for $1,400 when you can't even afford to go get a cup of coffee. Friends of mine walk around with that weight on their shoulders all the time, and yeah, you could be a dick and call "first world problems" on all of that, but I think the moment of feeling really alone, of wanting help, that's the transcending moment for all of us, it's relatable, and it's a pretty big universal bummer.

I walked to work in the gloomy weather we've been having, black pea coat and black books. I felt high on IV drugs and thought maybe I'd make it a whole shift. Thankfully, again, someone covered my shift and I got to walk home almost immediately. House to myself, night off, fucked up on Benadryl, still feeling pretty shitty, so what did I do? Netflix. I watched X-Men and a one episode of Buffy and then I started browsing around (genre: romantic) and I found a possibly made-for-TV movie with Miley Cyrus called Last Song or maybe The Last Song or A Last Song, anyway, the description was something like "troubled teen spends summer with estranged father" and I watched it immediately. As a whole, complete garbage, but with just enough redeeming moments to keep me watching. Very cute teenagers meet each other and have a summer fling where they tell each other "I love you" after the first month (puke) and hold hands a lot on the beach. However, the twist to the movie is that the dad actually has cancer or some other life threatening disease, and the two bond after so many years apart, and somewhere before the last scene where they complete a piano sonnet together (not making this up) I started crying just like before; big wet tears and glistening eyes and puffy cheeks. Thankfully none of my roommates came home. I got up and washed my face in the bathroom and told myself, "it's just a movie." Back on the sofa, five minutes later, I had snot and salt covering my face. How did I get to this point? Have I reached a new epitome of self-pity, or am I just too full of empathy to function? At the end of the movie, after the funeral, the boy decides to go to college in the town where the girl lives, and I went back into the bathroom, and threw up.

*Plato. I know this quote shows up A LOT in blogs, zines, my mom's emails, et cetera, but I think it's mildly overused because of its simplicity. Life sucks for a lot of people, and no one should assume anyone has it easy. I'm all for people taking care of their problems on their own, and being independent, and not wallowing in bullshit, but I also think it's important to be kind to people, especially the woman serving you coffee in the morning, or the mailman, or the kid at the punk rock show with no friends. You never know who just spent most of the day crying behind closed doors.

Something That Heals

"Time, I thought while lying in my bed, doesn't exist. What is exists in the movement of matter-or better- matter in motion, because //motion// doesn't exist any more than //time// and //space// exist; it's just the word we use to describe matter in motion. Time is not a thing. When asked what time is, we can't point to some specific object, the way we can if we're asked what a chair is, a column, a lancet window, hemoglobin. Time isn't tangible, just as space isn't tangible, and the idea that we could turn these artificial (yet useful) terms into something tangible, into something that heals, into something you can kill, or something you have to fight against, this might be one of our last great myths." *

"When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after- as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day- the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?"**

I woke up in Pensacola in room that was probably the average temperature of Iceland, woke up John, and we drove to the hospital half drunk and confused on sleep. I should have brushed my teeth. I should have combed my hair. I shouldn't have stayed up all night doing fake speed and drinking. Still, I had to go to the hospital (not for myself, my health problems seem to be getting better with copious amounts of allergy pills and antacid tablets). No one, not a single fucking person helped me when I got lost not once, but two times trying to find the ICU. Finally, I just stopped a nurse and asked. You'd think with someone like me walking around they'd want to make sure I wasn't stealing pills, but I guess now I know that the Sacred Heart Hospital will be my first stop when I go on some sort of Drugstore Cowboy rampage across Florida. So I found my dad, and he looked yellow (probably from the Iodine, I don't know if you know this but when you go into surgery they love to wash you with Iodine and it stains your body for days). He was sitting up and watching the weather channel, and didn't seemed surprised to see me. My step mom didn't look happy, she looked stressed out, but I don't think I had anything to do with it. I kissed Parker on the forehead and we talked about bullshit for five minutes (the weather, bullshit, my band playing a show the night before, bullshit, et cetera). He explained the surgery to me and it made me feel pretty sick to my stomach. I don't want to think about anyone's ribs being opened up like that, and veins in their leg replacing the deflated, empty veins in their heart. I got one of the nurses to get him some more morphine, they put the needle into the IV and put a fucking lot of it in his body. My step mom walked out to talk to someone and Parker starting telling me a story about my mom, when she and him were sailing out of Haiti and he broke his finger. I've heard the story about a thousand times, but not since he got remarried. Luckily, he finished the story and nodded off before I really started crying. My step mom and I hugged goodbye, and I walked alone through the mostly empty hospital and waited for John to come pick me back up.

Rose Cross played in St. Augustine, Gainesville, Pensacola, and Tallahassee. All the shows were fun, and I met some nice people, and I don't feel totally awful now that we're back. I read the quotes about time while we were driving on I-10, which can seem kind of surreal when you're eating Taco Bell for the third time in as many days and you know in a couple hours you're going to get really, really drunk. Sitting in a van being quiet can be hard for that part of your brain that thinks about choices and "what you're suppose to be doing." I'm sort of incapable of making any choices right now, I just want to play shows with my band and come home and listen to Agnostic Front's Victim in Pain on repeat. I just want to wake up and get coffee and maybe eat something and read a book. The bigger decisions can wait a little longer. I told someone this last week and I'll stick by it- don't make life decisions in the winter. Let's just wait for warmer weather, then we can resume freaking out.

*Marco Candida, Dream Diary

** Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Welcome to 2011

"The truth is, I don't believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant- no, pleasant isn't the word- it's an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there's no other choice but to write. For me, the word "writing" is the exact opposite of the word "waiting." Instead of waiting, there is writing. Well, I'm probably wrong- it's possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I'd like to think otherwise. But, as I've said, I'm probably wrong."*

I played a show tonight while my mom went to a concert and my dad got prepped for open heart surgery. They don't talk. I'll go see him Saturday morning in the Sacred Heart hospital in Pensacola, since we're playing Sluggo's tomorrow night anyway. Would I go see him otherwise? I'm not sure.

I've been breaking out in hives and it's hard to sleep because I wake up itching and I try to remember what I ate during the day and I just hope against hope that I'm not allergic to Publix subs. I've also been shitting blood a lot, but I wouldn't even begin to know who to talk to about that. Rich said if it's bright red blood not too worry about it, it's the dark stuff you've got to freak out about. That's what band mates are for. "Dark stuff to freak out about" sounds like a compelling theme for the new year, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and I've been doing a good job of waking up early and leaving the house (basically my only new years resolutions, that and not feeling stupid or sorry for myself). There's just some things I've been putting off and it's time to stop waiting.

Last night we played in a honky tonk bar in St. Augustine. The bartender ended up being an old childhood friend of mine, haven't seen him since I was four feet tall, but he's punk now too I guess, and it sort of made me amused all day to think about it. If my mom calls me back I'll tell her all about it, I can say, look mom, sometimes people just grow up to be punks. She probably won't be amused. Tonight there's a show in New York City I'd like to be at, and across the planet somewhere there's probably also a real quiet place just waiting for me.

*Roberto Bolano, The Last Interviews (63)